The "comrade" in comrade simba…

Believe it or not, back in 2000 I was daily listening to web casts of Rush Limbaugh. Pendulums are funny things – it’s a long arc from California beach hippy to registered republican, and a shorter arc back.

The Internet is an amazing tool. Some where in a surf I came across the idea that the best way out of a rut is to really explore the other side. Maybe it was a Buddhist thing. Anyway, I decided to go slumming over at the left wing sites and all the things Ollie North & Co. found abhorrent. Turns out Howard Stern is one funny guy, and a few holes developed in my filter. Realizing I was on to something I named myself comrade simba just because it brought up a vision of some afro’d militant commie revolutionary – the furthest thing possible from middle class white people in North America.

The pendulum had swung to it’s lowest point on the arc about the time of the ’04 elections. I was not liking Bush, and Kerry just made me want to kick puppies. Michael Badnarik caved and got a driver’s license. The bottom was in. We had moved to the farm, doom was in full swing, I found Cryptogon, Latoc, Survival Acres, etc. Also I was months away from the end of my 10 year driver’s license revocation, soon to be no longer transportationaly challenged, and totally disgusted with the State’s legal apparatus from 6 years of hardship denial on a “blow in the tube” technicality. “Comrade Simba”, the joke name, had come alive.

Good thing I wasn’t in my twenties, or maybe I would have thought of other things to do with fertilizer than top dress squash. I realized it really was all a joke – the world was a ponzie scheme and the meaning of life was more like chasing butterflies in the garden with my kid than being a consumer. I didn’t go build shit for other people for money once I got the license back – instead, getting self sufficient became more of my focus. The energy had gone out of the pendulum, by ’08 I didn’t care if Obama could save the world – I just didn’t want to go to the trouble of digging a root cellar and painting a sign that said “Thanks, McCain” to hang above the entrance.

There is no Communist tendency associated with the name. There is no militancy, either. There’s just you, and me, and we either drop out of the mold the elite masters have set out for us and grow some shit to eat, or suffer through the powerdown looking for scraps in the garbage heap civilization devolves into once the power’s out and there’s paper bags on all the gas pumps. We don’t need pitchforks for a revolution – we just need to do a lot of quitting. Our pendulum is swinging back from the fantasy of unlimited energy into a more human scale energy base. My battle with the 21st century is almost over. My comrades will make the transition with me, and the rest will scrabble along on their personal power trips.

And so, comrade simba it is. I could start posting as “Fred” but it’s already been taken. I don’t capitalize it either, ‘cuz it’s more of an idea than a name. I doubt the NSA or DHS search filters will catch the subtlety; if in doubt put him on the list. But I’m betting that by the time they start printing out the lists to distribute to law enforcement, somebody will have forgotten to stock up on copy paper…

An Appreciation Post

I felt like saying thanks for the comments from y’all. I may seem self absorbed and crotchety but I gotta say that every comment is piece of support for what I’m doing out here.

I was reading chickory’s last comment and something tumbled around inside – here’s a lady roughing it out in the Georgia outback planting shit for her family’s future security. That deserves an attagirl from all of us.

Here’s a question – does anyone else feel more connected with the other people that show up here? Anybody want me to hook up a chat module, or I checked out Twitter and it seems easy enough for us to get a touching base community going on with that.
So I put up https://twitter.com/comradesfarm
C’mon by if you want.

Thanks everybody – I really mean it.

Update – twitter is too silly for my tastes. sorry for the dead link.

Just Fine, Thanks for Asking…

That’s my polite response to the usual “how’s it going” generic greeting you get from anyone between total stranger and most family members. Total politeness asks us to return “…and how are you doing?” I don’t go that far. It’s not that I’m impolite, but I know damn well how 99% of the people I meet and greet are doing. I don’t want to start a conversation based on “I’m doing fine, thanks for asking. You, however, are probably destined to suffer horribly and die with a ‘this can’t be happening’ look in your eye when the financial empire goes bazzoo and the economy collapses”.

2-4-6-8 Who do we annihilate? Die off, die off, fuuuuck you!

Now, I’m not immune to lab altered swine flu virus sprayed from black helicopters, and there’s more than remote chance a marauding band could hit me before I can snipe them, but all in all I’ll live on until the heart blows up, cancer cuts me down, or a bizarre farming accident takes me out. What I won’t do is die from starvation, food poisoning, exposure, or riots and police actions. And that is my number one justification for throwing myself out here in the weeds and being responsible for a big garden and a hundred assorted critters demanding care multiple times a day.

It’s not that I want a massive kill/dieoff – I also don’t want it to be 97 degrees outside with 80% humidity. Bitching about the weather won’t change it; feeling one way or another about the masses’ future is just as pointless. I don’t even believe that all of humanity could avoid needless suffering by immediately ceasing to produce more offspring and embarking on a drastic anti-consumer lifestyle change – a minor snag like what to do with the surplus fast food employees would deal a fatal blow to any possible orderly transition.

That’s why you don’t hear TBTB talk about slowing the maw of consumption. Americans could easily stop buying worthless plastic crap they don’t need, cook their own meals from real ingredients, and not go to the mall for new clothes without suffering any real hardship – hell, it wouldn’t even be an inconvenience! But our entire economic system would collapse at a negative 20% growth rate.

So I’m living amongst 300 million mindless consumers that have built a society that collapses if a significant minority break out of their programming and stop buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have. That’s, simply put, a dangerous situation if one finds themselves dependent in all areas on the system staying intact. Ergo – I grow shit.

Notice that this whole screed is dependent on my personal belief that collapse will happen without anybody doing anything differently. No data or statistics to support what I think, just wild assed assumptions. Dismiss me as a crackpot if you will, but I won’t be the one asking “howyadoin?”

Uhhhh, Input Please?

So I owe Wells Fargo 57K for the rental house. The restoration bid was 65K, and after the insurance company ran the depreciation numbers into their Auto-Fuck the Insured computer the check will be 54K. Some guy offered 5K for the burned carcass, so I could just walk away with a couple thousand and be done with it.

However, I’d have a hard time spending more than 22K on materials to get the place salable for what we owe on it, maybe even low 60’s. So I think I’m going to come out of retirement (bwahahaha), strap on the nail bag and have one more go at a gut and strip remodel job. 32K for six months of god damn construction hassle is just too much money to walk away from.

Maybe it’s a mid life crisis. Swagger around with my leather framer bags hanging off my hips sweating like pig. Perhaps it’s an opportunity to rail against suburbia as I beat lathe and plaster off walls and bitch about the state of youth in this country ‘cuz ya can’t get any good help anymore. It’s probably simple greed. I want a tractor that runs, farm implements, a doomer shopping spree at the gun store and the wife wants a new kitchen. My inner doomer senses big change coming soon, so a lot of this is just one last huzzah! before TSHTF and I never leave the county again. Hey – a lot of so called doomers are taking a last trip to Disneyland while dollars can still be spent. Makes sense that I’d opt for saddling myself with a mega project when puttering in the tomatoes is a full time gig.

Waiting on the check…

Too Much In The Head

And not enough time to get it all done.

Folks, I’m mentally zorched and physically pulped. My wife laughed and said she’s pissed at me for not being able to do the impossible. The crops and critters are a job in themselves, add the doomer building projects in the soup and the plate is too full to do much blogging.

Then the rental house garage got torched – probably neighborhood kids who found the door wide open to the alley irresistible. Had so much fun with that they came back a few days ago and set fire to the house itself.

So add a heap of insurance paperwork, mortgage upside downness and fire restoration (read: gut and strip) to the pot and weigh corn planting on one hand and sheet rock on the other.

If I play my cards right I may get a tractor out of this fiasco. Bad hand and I lose my ass… I just wanted to putter in the tomatoes whiling away my sunset years… God damn 21st century.

ps. posted a better quality vid to the previous post.